Wind Met 99% of Scots’ Power Needs in October, and Other Green Successes

Wind and solar keep falling in price – each fell 6% in 2016. That fall was not as big as the two previous years, but there is every reason to expect price drops much bigger in coming years, as new technology makes the move from basic science to implementation. The Trump strategy of slapping penalties on these technologies and giving fossil fuels subsidies has a very limited shelf life, since there aren’t enough resources in the world to stand against this kind of inexorable progress.

On average through the year, Scotland now gets 60% of its electricity from renewables and is on track to get 100% from green sources by 2020. One impediment standing in the way is that the English-dominated government of the UK is deeply tied to BP and other fossil fuel companies and keeps trying to hobble green energy. In the UK as a whole, green energy only produces 29% of electricity.

In Sweden, this one wind farm will increase the country’s wind power by 12.5%. Sweden is already a relatively low-carbon country for an industrial economy, though it can do substantially better. Some 83 per cent of the country’s electricity comes from nuclear and hydroelectric power. Only 7% comes from wind at the moment.

Still, the average Swede emits over 4 tons of carbon dioxide a year. That is better than Europe’s average 6 tons and way better than the US average of 16 tons per year per person (!!!). But 4 tons a person is still huge, given that CO2 is like setting off atomic bombs in the atmosphere. The new Markbygden ETT wind farm will be an important step toward carbon-free Swedish electricity. Of course, that has to be combined with switching to electric vehicles and adopting low-carbon agricultural and building techniques if we are to move to a net carbon zero civilization.

Juan Cole

Contributor

Juan Cole is the Richard P. Mitchell Collegiate Professor of History at the University of Michigan and the proprietor of the Informed Comment e-zine. He has written extensively on modern Islamic movements in…